Streaming

RTMP

You do not need to download an MP4 file to watch it with Omxplayer. If you have the URL of a (H.264) rtmp:// stream, just stream it with:

omxplayer rtmp://...

To stream a (H.264) rtmpt://... URL with Omxplayer, just change the head rtmp:// to rtmpt://.

RTSP

Support for RTSP was added in 2012[1] (for instance, allowing the use of VLC media player as the streaming server).

Example:

omxplayer -o local rtsp://192.168.3.100:8554/stream1

Troubleshooting

Black screen after playback

If you get a black screen on your X11 sesktop after Omxplayer is finished, you can use this command to restore your view:

xrefresh -display :0

Or you can use a small Bash script for video playback to do this every time:

#/bin/bash
omxplayer "$@"
xrefresh -display :0

On Raspbian, xrefresh is part of the x11-xserver-utils package
(apt-get install x11-xserver-utils).

No rights to VCHIQ

On bare installations of the default distributions, Omxplayer often has insufficient permissions to access /dev/vchiq. One solution would be to run Omxplayer as root, but a nicer solution is to add a udev rule so that /dev/vchiq is also accessible from other users. To accomplish this, do the following under root: